Yeltsin Rival Barred From His Own Office

First they took away his official Mercedes-Benz limo, bodyguards and personal physician. Then his chairmanship of government panels on agrarian reform and corruption and his right to receive visitors in the Kremlin.

At 9:45 a.m. Monday, the second-highest elected official in Russia, Alexander V. Rutskoi, suffered the latest humiliation of his power struggle with President Boris N. Yeltsin: Kremlin security guards stopped the vice president at the door of his own office and turned him away.

If that weren’t enough, the special government phone lines to Rutskoi’s country home and his car suddenly went dead.

Rutskoi, a 45-year-old air force major general and Afghan War hero, was Yeltsin’s handpicked running mate in Russia’s first democratic presidential election in 1991. Today he is a leading critic of Yeltsin’s free-market reforms and his nearest political rival in popularity.

Since accusing Yeltsin last March of acting like a dictator, Rutskoi has seen his own power and his perks fall away. Immune from outright dismissal and unwilling to quit, he has announced his own presidential ambitions and launched a crusade to have several presidential aides prosecuted on embezzlement charges.

In return, a commission headed by Yeltsin’s justice minister accused Rutskoi last month of taking a $3-million kickback from a Swiss company to facilitate a contract to export baby food to Russia.

Yeltsin announced last Wednesday that he was “suspending” Rutskoi from official duties pending the outcome of that case. Yeltsin ordered First Deputy Prime Minister Vladimir F. Shumeiko, the highest official targeted by Rutskoi’s probe, to step down too.

Because Rutskoi had for months been vice president in name only, the practical effect of his “suspension” was not clear--until he showed up for work Monday.

The official Itar-Tass news agency said the vice president’s Kremlin office was sealed “to avert any manipulation of documents and in the interests of the investigation.” The orders came from the Kremlin commandant and Yeltsin’s chief of staff, according to another Russian news agency, Interfax.

Rutskoi stormed out of the Kremlin and over to a meeting of opposition lawmakers in the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature. The latest action against him is “a full-scale state coup,” he declared.